the new side door (finally)

after waiting for what seemed like eons for the custom side door to get made and then coordinate the installation, it's in and it matches the garden window like we hoped:





and a closeup (let's see the bandits kick this down):

arrrgh, thar be bandits!

as we were getting close to the tail end of the office projects, we came home after work on a friday to find this:



the would-be bandits smashed the glass and were likely dismayed by finding a double cylinder lock in their way, so they tried to kick the door down. too bad for them, the door jambs are solid 1926 douglas fir:



the deadbolt gave its life to keep the house safe and the burglars never got in:



we had wanted to replace the door when we were redoing the kitchen, and now we have a reason. unfortunately, while we are waiting for the door to arrive, we must live like the zombie apocalypse is coming:

office round 1 - the closet

the first project tackled in the office was the closet. first, demolition:





the plan for this closet is for it to also serve as the house networking hub, so all of the network cables will run to this closet and be handled by the router. to accommodate all of the wires, a big hole was drilled in the sill down to the crawlspace:



since routers need power, we also installed a new outlet next to the data outlet. a quick patch up job and it's as good as new:



the closet windows were also so heavily painted over they barely closed, so more stripping:



paint and installation of the new closet hardware and we're done:

the first of three bedrooms - the office

the next project to tackle is the office. some current shots:







and the closet:



the plans for the room include new windows to replace the casement windows that open inward, new closet hardware, installing network ports, paint, and building a new desk.

we're famous...ok, not really

the wonderful home decorating blog, Apartment Therapy, did a story on lori's door finishes, check it out!

finally, the linen closet

with the tools living in their proper home (the garage), we could tackle the linen closet and the smells within. here's what the hall looked like when we started:


we're not sure why there was a deadbolt on the linen closet, but we took care of that along with re-installing mortise hardware (we even found a glass knob set hiding in the closet that matches the rest of the knobs in the house!). here's the stinky domain:



when we pulled out the old shelves, we realized that they were the source of the stink. while we could have just replaced these shelves to eradicate the stink, we were already set to turn it into a cedar closet, so we proceeded. here's after the cedar was installed with the new shelves, and the hall has been painted:



back to the closet door, we first made a hole plug to start the deadbolt fill:



filling the hole left from the new-school cylinder handle was trickier. this was the original door so digging out the filler used to fill the old mortise set wasn't a problem, but the hole was bored right where the mortise would have to live. to get around this, we made another hole plug, then attched the plug to a 2x4 and ran the plug through a table saw to cleanly remove material so the mortise would fit partially inside of the hole plug:



and here it is installed:



and here's the hallway with the refinished door installed (and with lori's lovely finish):



and a close-up of the linen closet finish:



here's an overall view of the completed hallway with four of lori's six doors visible:

tackling the garage

for the past two years we've stored tools in the linen closet mostly because the linen closet smelled weird. no, the linen closet didn't smell weird due to the tools; the smell came before the tools though probably the tools didn't improve the odor. lori was approaching her limit living without a linen closet so another home for the tools had to be found -- the garage. but first, the garage had to be reorganized.

here's one side before we started. the shelves were sagging, the cabinet was falling apart, and our firewood was stacked on the floor of the garage:



to remedy the shortcomings, we installed new heavy-duty shelves, bought a bike rack to hold jason's bike, bought a log-holder to store the wood, and even included storage up high for spare construction supplies:



the garage came with a significant amount of storage already built, but we weren't using it that effectively. construction supplies were haphazardly leaning about and the shelves were disorganized:



once the paint and construction supplies were organized we were able to more effectively use the space we have, and we bought hooks to hang many of our garden tools:



the last section of the garage was identified as jason's future workbench area. there's only one word to describe the original state or this area - gross:



the final product made jason very excited. he built a work bench, got a tool rollaway, and installed peg board, a small cabinet, and an overhead work light:



the workbench surface was made from cheap solid oak flooring planks - it turned out pretty well: